Posts tagged with Smartphones

Apple's press conference last Friday was a notable event for the company. Not simply because Steve Jobs took the stage, but because the purpose of the press conference was to address problems being reported with an existing product, the iPhone 4.

It was unfamiliar territory for Apple and Steve Jobs. Jobs, of course, is used to introducing new products, not dealing with an existing one that is the subject of customer complaints, class action lawsuits and a media firestorm.

After serving as the subject of rumors, the struggling mobile device company has a new owner, HP. The tech giant paid $1.2bn for the company that invented the smartphone.

Not only was HP not one on the list of companies thought to be looking closely at a Palm acquisition, but one might even question why HP was interested in Palm in the first place. The answer: HP has big goals in the mobile arena, and thinks Palm's technology and expertise can help it achieve them.

Can the world's number one search company design and sell a mobile phone to consumers direct via the internet? With the launch of the Nexus One smartphone on January 5, 2010, Google set out to answer that question.

74 days later, we have a reasonable estimate of how many Nexus Ones Google has moved: 135,000. The hard part: answering that first question.

The iPhone may have revolutionized the smartphone market, but as other competitors launch their own web friendly phones, Apple's Jesus phone is starting to have to fight for market dominance. And while other phones may not have seeped into consumer consciousness in the same way yet, that doesn't mean they wont.

According to Crowd Sicence's brand loyalty survey, 1/3 of Blackberry users are willing to switch to Google's Android operating system when they purchase a smarphone. But there's still the matter of whether Google's online stategy can compete with AT&T and other carriers' sales strengths.

Consumers will spend $6.2 billion this year on mobile
apps, downloading 4.5 billion times from app stores. Yet eight out of 10 app downloads won't be sold at all, but rather be free to end users. Advertising and marketing will close the revenue gap.

These findings come from Gartner, which forecasts worldwide mobile
app downloads will exceed 21.6 billion by 2013. Free
downloads will account for 82 per cent of all downloads this year, 87 per cent three years hence.

The Nexus One has generated a lot of buzz over the past week for a
number of good reasons. Google's foray into the competitive smartphone
market is arguably one of the company's boldest yet.

Google may deliver success with the Nexus One but its
direct-to-consumer sales model, which some claim could disrupt mobile
carriers, is also drawing attention to Google's customer service
limitations.

More evidence for the growth of mobile commerce is provided by stats released yesterday which show that 37% of US smartphone users have made a (non-mobile) purchase on their handsets in the last six months.

It's already been established that iPhone users are happy spending money on their phones. Just this week AppsFire, found that the average iPhone user has spent $80 on apps for their phone.

But the key to the mobile ad market rests in bringing relevant ads to people where they are, on the go. For marketers to succeed with location-based advertising, consumers have to cooperate. Luckily, mobile phone users are proving open to advertising on their phones — especially when they're relevant.